To be truthful, my initial goal with this article was to respond to readers who were just getting started and wanted a shopping list of things to buy for their food storage pantry. I also wanted to compile a checklist that more experienced preppers could use to compare what they had to what they needed. My goal can pretty much be summed up by saying that I wanted to write about getting started with food storage the easy way. No frills, no fluff – just a common sense list of food items to get you started.
Part of prepping is not just stocking up on items, but also acquiring certain skills and training that will prove useful. Below is a list of many different skills you can learn. While you can’t be a master of all trades, it may be beneficial to focus on 2-3 skills you can become an expertise at. Then you will become the go to guy time and time again 🙂

I went home, shaken and shaking, all of the adrenaline flooding me at once. I slept uneasily, tossing and turning in my bed. I wanted my partner to sleep next to me, but also couldn't bear to be touched. I had nightmares that lasted for weeks: dizzying, confusing dreams where I was struggling to breathe or see but could hear pain all around me, and I would wake up panting and sweating.

Blame modern diets, blame our longevity, or blame the mistakes of mother nature - but the bottom line is that for most humans, dental problems are a question of "when", not "if". And when excruciating pain strikes at an inopportune time, it's really no laughing matter: in absence of adequate medical care, tooth problems have been known to push some people to the verge of suicide.

Based on this crude but honest assessment of the general public's affinity for the common bicarbonate, you'd be surprised by how much survivalists are into it (#2 on the list of "things for preppers to hoard"). They must expect some pretty serious hankerings for tasty leavened baked goods, or they have extensive phobias about the funkiness of their nuke survival backup plans.
CRKT Knives and Karen Hood of Survival.com and Survival Quarterly Magazine are proud to announce the newest in the CRKT line of wilderness survival knives, the HoodWork™ and the HCK1™. While the phrase “Survival…it’s all in your head” is an intrinsic part of everything Karen Hood, Survival.com and Survival Quarterly Magazine, a good knife can also mean the difference between life and death in an extreme situation.

At the time, Americans were marvelling at engineering advances—attendees at the 1893 World’s Fair, in Chicago, beheld new uses for electric light—but were also protesting low wages, poor working conditions, and corporate greed. “It was very much like today,” White said. “It was a sense that the political system had spun out of control, and was no longer able to deal with society. There was a huge inequity in wealth, a stirring of working classes. Life spans were getting shorter. There was a feeling that America’s advance had stopped, and the whole thing was going to break.”

Being from the south, we eat a lot of cornbread, so I would have to add cornmeal to this list. I think that cornbread would be an excellent option for a grid down situation. It’s very simple to make, cornmeal, and water, plus salt or any extra veggies you may have. I would also add dry pasta, and oil, for cooking and seasoning your cast iron. I may have missed this, but what about peroxide and alcohol? But you thought of a lot of things I never would have. Great list!
This is the mainstay of what I have except for a couple of items I am missing. Be careful with the pancake mix as it has a short shelf life and make sure to rotate it often. This article has helped a lot. I was worried I did not have enough but have a much larger quantity and feel so much better. I also have variety of other items mixed in and this goes way beyond my every day pantry. With 70 lbs of rice and 15 of beans and 10 of oats as a basis. Working on the beans, I have about 24 cans of meat. A ton of cans of veggies and fruit and cases soup in cans, mixes, cubes etc. I have 15 lbs of matzoh and 5 of crackers. I have about 8 cases of ramen noodles. I have bread mixes, cake mixes, honey, tea, coffee, powdered milk, spices, at least 10 lbs of salt. I have sugar at least 25 lbs but I think more. I have flour. I have at least a dozen pasta and sauces. I have 8 giant sized jars of peanut butter and rotate them out, five giant cans of drink mix(tang and iced tea) This is all besides my regular pantry that would easily last a month and I rotate my groceries from this so they do not expire. I have 200 gallons of drinkable water plus filtration and tablets and bleach for much more. I have all this but still I have the urgent feeling that it is never enough and when I grocery shop am always trying to add one or two items. I know I have six months of survival for 3 adults but thinking maybe it is more.

In all the years I’ve worked with preparedness one of the biggest problems I’ve seen is people storing food and not knowing what to do with it. It’s vital that you and your family become familiar with the things you are storing. You need to know how to prepare these foods. This is not something you want to learn under stress. Your family needs to be used to eating these foods. A stressful period is not a good time to totally change your diet. Get a food storage cookbook and learn to use these foods!

Mindset is everything. Mental preparation comes first. I would change number 12 to number 1 and say,”practice, practice, practice…”. A wilderness solo for a few days (after you “practice, practice, practice…” for a while) will cause a dramatic change in your self reliance level. It did mine and that’s why almost everything I acquire has multiple possible uses. For instance, my business card case is metal and has possibilities as a weapon and a signaling mirror. “Wildwood Wisdom” by Ellsworth Jaeger is a good place to start. He shows how to “think” survival like no one else.

If you want to prepare for more outlandish, long-term disasters, or if you have a large family, you can make realistic plans only if you live in a single-family home. This decision alone may give you access to 50-100 gallons of water sitting in the water heater (unless it's a tankless design). Next, if you have some backyard space, you may opt for relatively inexpensive 55 gallon plastic barrels ($60), taking up about as much space a small curbside trash can. Another common option, costing about the same per gallon stored, is a 275 gallon tote ($325). Such solutions can easily provide water for an entire family for up to several months at 2 quarts per person per day, with some allowance for laundry and hygiene needs. Some preppers stockpile even more - but really, if you waited this long and the conditions are still dire, it may be high time to hit the road and find some other place to live.

While these guides may be made available through Print on Demand services, they're just as likely to be distributed primarily as direct PDF downloads. These get passed around forums, reviewed on survivalist blog networks, and included on "USB survival libraries"—normal USB drives loaded with PDFs of survival books and reference materials. When the guides are being sold directly from the producers, you'll often see them bundled with a few bonus guides (maybe only 15 to 25 pages) with clickbait-flavored listicle-type titles: The 25 Biggest Mistakes That Will Get You Killed When the Shit Hits the Fan. 10 Must-Have Bug-Out Pack Items. The 15 Best Survival Guns for Stockpiling. That sort of thing.

Curt Rankin—a Lebanon entrepreneur with the demeanor and looks of Mike Huckabee before he got fat—bought Gardening Revolution in December. In his 50s, Rankin is a kid relishing in his father’s approval as Pense, inside the Strafford cabin, explains why Rankin seemed like the best candidate to keep the company going. The prodigal son is already reworking the website and devising marketing schemes to maintain the momentum, and Pense now teaches missionaries, who will take his raised-bed system across the globe.

While all plastic will eventually leach into the food product, if you cycle what you are storing out at least every six months, it should not be a problem. Plastic containers are great because they do not break as easily as glass, are cheap, and are reusable. If the plastic containers you are using are clear, it is best to store them in a dark closet or room so the light will not degrade your food storage.

Now I am obviously a big fan of couponing, but it can come at a price. One of the classic dilemmas about couponing is whether or not to use a coupon on a brand-name item, or to just buy the store-brand item. This decision will almost always be circumstantial. Sometimes, the store-brand item will be a better deal than the brand-name plus coupon. If you are new to couponing, it can be quite frustrating, as it seems like you are spending more money than you did before just to get all of the deals. This may be true, and it may cause you to want to switch to store-brand items. While this is not always a bad idea, as inexperienced couponers can end up spending a lot of money, make sure you do the comparison to find the better deal. Also, always remember, particularly for a stockpile, that timing matters! The store-brand may be the better deal this week, but next week might be double coupon week, meaning you could get that item for free next week as opposed to paying a little for the store-brand this week. Doing your research on a case-by-case basis and remaining patient are keys for amassing a completely free stockpile.

Mountain House, Wise Food, My Patriot Supply, and Ready Store need to get better in this regard. In some cases, we had to call a company and dig deeper than reasonable in order to find out calorie content — or we had to look at individual nutritional labels to reverse engineer the math. In other cases they called something a “1-month bucket” but that was based on silly calorie numbers.
A rubber mallet is a great tool to have to seal food grade buckets. Place the lid in its place on the filled bucket, and whack the lid into place around the perimeter of the lid. Once you have secured the lid, you can test for a good seal by picking the bucket up by the lid. The weight of the food stored is a pretty good test for whether the lid is securely attached.
Effective preparedness can be simple, but it has to be rooted in an honest and systematic review of the risks you are likely to face. Plenty of excited newcomers begin by shopping for ballistic vests and night vision goggles; they would be better served by grabbing a fire extinguisher, some bottled water, and then putting the rest of their money in a rainy-day fund.
Every survival kit and emergency preparedness plan should include emergency blankets and lights. Mylar blankets effectively reflect body heat, and can keep you warm throughout a cold night. Their extreme lightweight and compact size make them an ideal part of a survival kit. To ensure you have adequate light in the event of a power failure, chemical snap lights are a convenient solution that doesn’t rely on batteries. Many snap lights last for 12 hours or more, and have a five year shelf life, so you know they’ll be there for you when you need them.
Partly that’s because here (northern moor and heath) ‘living off the land’ is an almost impossibility (SERE trains us how to ‘survive’ in similar places, but crucially only until escape or rescue, but even then that isn’t ‘living’ it’s ‘existing’). I’d guess from (saw and camo) you’re in an arboreal forest area. Life is ‘possible’ there (I’ve spent many a summer in northern Norway/Sweden (I have Sami friends) with nothing but a rifle, knife, axe, saw, fire-starter, water-bottle and tin mug, tarp and the clothes on my back … but that isn’t in winter, and it isn’t when thousands of others may be doing the same thing. Surviving with only what you can carry in, even in a large vehicle, is a short term option at best, I think. (Remember, even Grizzly Adams nearly, would have, died without help and a store to get supplies from).
Great article! It is so helpful to read about the basics again and again. IMHO, the most important guiding point in the article is to prep what you will actually eat. This week my husband cooked DAK ham in a skillet with potatoes and melted cheese. It was just okay. I’m not crazy about the ham and am choosing not to prep it. Proteins have been the most difficult for me. So far, proteins I am SURE I will eat are all kinds of dried and canned beans, shelf-stable tofu (Mori-Nu), and Campbell’s Roadhouse Chili. This chili tastes a lot better than Hormel and tastes great over rice. The Mori-Nu tofu can be heated in a minute in the same pot with a pack or 2 of ramen noodles. I don’t use the seasining pouches b/c of MSG so I add a little soy sauce and dried ginger to the noodle-cooking water. Dehydrated scallions would be good addition but I have not tried dehydrated food yet. Although I do not like canned salmon or regular salmon pouches, I found pouches of grilled salmon and smoked salmon which I’m going to force myself to try this week.
Braxton and Kara Southwick from Utah offer a tour of a declassified bunker. They will star in the upcoming National Geographic Channel show 'Doomsday Preppers,' featuring Americans stockpiling for the end of the world. NGC conducted an online survey with 1,040 people to find out how they would spend their final days. Here are some of the results. By Tim Loehrke, USA TODAY
Thanks for the comment Thomas. Just curious, how do you cook with your dehydrated mushrooms? I like to use frozen vegetables and dehydrate them. Frozen carrots that are cut into the circles dehydrate down to about the size of a pencil eraser. They plump up nice when rehydrated and you can’t tell the difference. Some veggies seem to work better than others.
I didn't know anything about the client, let's call him Dimitri, other than that he lived in Florida, and that he had about $600 for me if I could pump out 100 pages on how to survive the end of the world. The only way to make a living on writing projects at these prices is to do them quickly. In some cases, freelancers are asked to "spin" extant books—that is, to essentially copy the structure and content of those books but to make them new enough to reasonably (and legally) market them as new products. This is related to, but still distinct from the practice of article spinning, in which the same human-written article is quickly reorganized and reworded to create one or more additional "new" articles. (This is often done by software that has a built-in spintax that replaces keywords in the text with synonyms.)
I asked Hoffman to estimate what share of fellow Silicon Valley billionaires have acquired some level of “apocalypse insurance,” in the form of a hideaway in the U.S. or abroad. “I would guess fifty-plus per cent,” he said, “but that’s parallel with the decision to buy a vacation home. Human motivation is complex, and I think people can say, ‘I now have a safety blanket for this thing that scares me.’ ” The fears vary, but many worry that, as artificial intelligence takes away a growing share of jobs, there will be a backlash against Silicon Valley, America’s second-highest concentration of wealth. (Southwestern Connecticut is first.) “I’ve heard this theme from a bunch of people,” Hoffman said. “Is the country going to turn against the wealthy? Is it going to turn against technological innovation? Is it going to turn into civil disorder?”
If you can afford to spend more than $50 / week…. DON’T. You’re gonna make a lot of mistakes in the beginning so, the more your read, the less likely you are to buy overpriced food, guns and gear. Sure, you have to buy stuff but knowing which stuff to buy and having the right skills is much more important. Ideally, you should make a budget and then stick to it.
Once you get going, it will be easy to lose track of what you already have. The best way to overcome the state of confusion you will experience six months down the road is to start keeping track of your stored items now – from the beginning. Use a spiral notebook, a computer spreadsheet, or a clipboard and a pad of paper. Update your inventory with the item and date of purchase as it goes into storage and of course, mark it off as it rotates out.

Around 2011, Finelli sat in the waiting room at KWTO ahead of his radio appearance. He was there to spread the gospel of preparedness to family and friends who he thought needed to know. It was his first time on-air. He was nervous. Springfield pain specialist Dr. Norman Shealy noticed Finelli’s angst after he finished his own radio spot and gave him a few drops of Air Bliss, an essential oil blend he developed to calm the nerves. The remedy worked, and Finelli began wearing his new friend Norm’s sapphire crystals around his neck.

While many outdoor enthusiasts consider the color of a survival kit to be of minor importance, it actually makes good sense to think about this important characteristic. For example, it will be much easier to find your survival kit in an emergency if it is brightly colored or reflective. By contrast, you may find yourself in a situation in which you’ll want to keep a low profile, such as if you are trying to avoid dangerous people. In these cases, you’ll want a black or earth-toned survival kit to help avoid drawing attention to yourself. There are no right or wrong answers in this regard, but you’d be wise to think through the issue carefully before making your choice.

Craig Compeau is a third-generation Alaskan who is prepping for a government takeover. Craig has set up a remote bugout InterShelter in the Alaskan wilderness. We also meet 44-year-old adventurer David Lakota who depends on his intuition and connection to nature to survive a giant tsunami and the mountainous terrain of Hawaii. During the program David and his girlfriend Rachaelle bug out with minimal supplies from the Kalalau Valley on Kaua'i to the 4000' high plateaus above.

And what better place to prepare than the Ozarks? Strafford got 47 inches of rain last year; the mean temperature was a mild 59 degrees. The Springfield Plateau has a 200-foot-deep aquifer for when rainwater gets scarce. The region is largely insulated from natural disasters—save the odd tornado or benign rumbling from the Bootheel’s New Madrid Fault Line—and the low population density of like-minded folks means preppers, survivalists and homesteaders get left alone. A Lebanon real estate agent tells me remote acreage is an increasingly hot commodity for city dwellers eager to go native. Conversations with locals and time spent on survivalism forums reveal a religious cohort who believe the Ozarks are God’s country—sacred ground upon which one can wage a last stand against the sins of a rapidly globalizing world.

If there was anything my freeze-dried food experiment taught me, it was how lucky I was to be able to walk down the street and buy a sandwich whenever I wanted to—but also how far I was from being self-reliant in the more quotidian sense. If freeze-dried meals are becoming increasingly popular in America, then maybe it’s because many of us realize that if something really bad happened, we wouldn’t know the first thing about surviving for a week on the ingredients lying around in our pantry. But as we continue to be bombarded by headlines foreshadowing epic floods, economic collapse, and nuclear escalation, there’s nothing wrong with finding a little peace of mind in a bag of dehydrated Chicken A La King.
So Southwick and his wife, Kara, also 40, and their six children, ages 13-21, have stored 700 pounds of flour, 600 pounds of sugar, 800 pounds of wheat, water, gas, diesel fuel, chemical suits, coal, charcoal, 14 guns and eight chickens. They're ready to haul it in trucks and trailers to a cabin redoubt 90 minutes from their home in the West Jordan suburb of Salt Lake City if calamity hits.
When I am going through a grocery store gathering survival food, I get some strange looks from people close enough to hear me muttering under my breath as I discount items. Phrases like “not enough calories”, “needs more fat”, not enough carbs”, and the like roll off my tongue frequently. The truth of the matter is that what we consider to be a healthy diet in normal times is probably inadequate in a high stress, very active, crisis situation. There is a reason we like carbs, and fats, and sugars, and that reason is our body needs these things. The human palate developed in times when being physically active and dealing with life threatening events was the norm, and when a steady supply of food was not a guarantee. Hence the urge to get all we can when we can, which leads to rampant obesity in modern sedentary times but is adaptive to survival in harder times.
These are not your typical 5 gallon buckets from the Home Depot. Food grade buckets are made of a different type of plastic to prevent leaching. They cost a little more than your typical buckets, but are worth it for the added safety and flavor of your food. Food storage buckets should be made with high density polyethylene without BPAs, and be manufactured to meet NMFC, FDA, and UFC requirements. A bucket could have the triangle on the bottom with the number two and the HDPE mark, but not be food grade. This could be due to the construction method, not being able to provide a secure seal, made of reused materials, or even reused themselves after chemicals or paint. HDPE buckets are still porous, and can absorb chemicals stored in it. Make sure that you purchase from a reliable source so you don’t get duped. If you do decide to get used buckets, make sure they have only been used to store food and be prepared to clean them thoroughly.
Disrupted access to water, food, energy, or transportation. Substantial and prolonged outages happen everywhere; many of us will experience at least one at some point in our lives. A week without electricity may be just inconvenient and scary, especially in a high-rise or in a seedy neighborhood; but even a single hot day without potable water is universally bad news.
Dry survival rations. Sold under several brands, including Datrex, ER Bar, S.O.S., Grizzly, and more. Biscuit-like, less sugary and with a more agreeable taste than energy bars - somewhat reminiscent of shortbread. In my book, S.O.S. and Datrex taste best. Very inexpensive (~550 kcal per dollar) and should last 5-10 years when stored in a cool place. A tolerable choice for short- to medium-term nutrition in an emergency. Easy to pack, giving you ~2,200 kcal per pound.
You can mitigate this to some degree by throwing some of these types of food into your everyday menus now. I know these things aren’t quite as healthy as the fresh foods we have the privilege to enjoy daily right now, but if you feel like you are truly going to need to rely on some of these items at some point, by sampling the foods, you can find your family’s favorites and stock up on those.
In practice, the process can be a bit tricky. Freeze-dried meals require that you have potable water lying around, which might not be the case in the event of a serious calamity (some Wise Company kits include water purifiers). The cooking instructions for the Wise products I tested call for using the entire four-serving bag at once, which means that you have to have a container on hand to store what you don’t eat, and a fridge to keep it from spoiling. Even at my office kitchen, the only way I could make it work was by pouring about a fourth of the packet in a mug, filling it with water, and putting another mug on top of it.

I have a .30-.30 Win. lever action disguised as a Floor lamp with a shade. The shade is glued to a long dowel small enough to go down the barrell. The Butt Stock shoves and fits tight into a weighted block of wood like a christmas tree stand; and its loaded with one up the spout. Just pull out the shade and rod; stand on the base push gun away from yourself and pull up. Only 2 movements in the ready if you don’t count cocking the Hammer. It won’t fire unless you compress the Lever mechanism. Its already cocked anyway.

But in 1961 John F. Kennedy encouraged “every citizen” to help build fallout shelters, saying, in a televised address, “I know you would not want to do less.” In 1976, tapping into fear of inflation and the Arab oil embargo, a far-right publisher named Kurt Saxon launched The Survivor, an influential newsletter that celebrated forgotten pioneer skills. (Saxon claimed to have coined the term “survivalist.”) The growing literature on decline and self-protection included “How to Prosper During the Coming Bad Years,” a 1979 best-seller, which advised collecting gold in the form of South African Krugerrands. The “doom boom,” as it became known, expanded under Ronald Reagan. The sociologist Richard G. Mitchell, Jr., a professor emeritus at Oregon State University, who spent twelve years studying survivalism, said, “During the Reagan era, we heard, for the first time in my life, and I’m seventy-four years old, from the highest authorities in the land that government has failed you, the collective institutional ways of solving problems and understanding society are no good. People said, ‘O.K., it’s flawed. What do I do now?’ ”
Great article! It is so helpful to read about the basics again and again. IMHO, the most important guiding point in the article is to prep what you will actually eat. This week my husband cooked DAK ham in a skillet with potatoes and melted cheese. It was just okay. I’m not crazy about the ham and am choosing not to prep it. Proteins have been the most difficult for me. So far, proteins I am SURE I will eat are all kinds of dried and canned beans, shelf-stable tofu (Mori-Nu), and Campbell’s Roadhouse Chili. This chili tastes a lot better than Hormel and tastes great over rice. The Mori-Nu tofu can be heated in a minute in the same pot with a pack or 2 of ramen noodles. I don’t use the seasining pouches b/c of MSG so I add a little soy sauce and dried ginger to the noodle-cooking water. Dehydrated scallions would be good addition but I have not tried dehydrated food yet. Although I do not like canned salmon or regular salmon pouches, I found pouches of grilled salmon and smoked salmon which I’m going to force myself to try this week.

Either way, when done with the list, be sure to re-read the response plans you drafted earlier on and cross-reference them with this spreadsheet. Iterate until you're happy with both, then print out the docs and place them somewhere intuitive. In a stressful situation, you will be able to quickly review the printouts to confirm that you are not missing anything.

Unfortunately, some outdoor enthusiasts find themselves being threatened by nefarious people or dangerous animals. This leads some to keep a weapon or self-defense tool in their survival kit, in order to be better prepared for a worst-case scenario. Your self-defense tool may take the form of a knife or gun, but be sure to consider less-than-lethal items too. This would include things like stun guns, pepper spray, and telescoping batons. Just be sure to follow all local laws and regulations before packing any type of weapon or self-defense tool in your survival kit.